berlin (jta) | When Germany’s new Jewish-themed film comedy reaped the most nominations for the country’s highest film awards in May, hardly anyone was more surprised than the filmmaker himself.
Now “Alles auf Zucker” (“Go for Zucker”) has swept the awards, winning six prizes — including Best Film, Best Director and Best Actor. The film is opening the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
The Best Film award, announced last week, carries a prize of about $600,000.
“I am not used to such attention,” the Swiss-born director, Dani Levy, 47, said in a recent telephone interview. Levy has had several other moderate successes in Germany but never a film “that everyone loves. For me, it’s a miracle.”
“Go for Zucker” outpaced “The Downfall,” a dark film about Hitler’s last weeks, in the race for the top awards.
What’s funny about an extended family in which fervent religion is pitted against ultra-assimilation, the communist is pitted against the unscrupulous businessman, the lesbian against the Chassid and the mama’s boy against the supersexy cousin?
What’s funny about the conflict between former East and West Germany played out through the eyes of Jews? And what’s funny about a Jewish gambling addict who blames his failures on anti-Semitism?
Everything, it seems.
“Naturally, Jews always know how to laugh over themselves. It’s in our nature,” said Levy, who now lives with his wife and child in Berlin, the city where his mother was born. “What maybe is new here is that Jews are presented with self-confidence. The older generation was afraid to broadcast such images of themselves because they were afraid of anti-Semitism and prejudice. With the new generation, these fears are not so widespread.”
In Germany, a film has to appeal to non-Jewish audiences to be a success, and this one does.
“You can watch ‘Zucker’ and know nothing about Jews and still enjoy it,” said Nicola Galliner, the founder and director of the 11-year-old Jewish film festival in Berlin, which also thrives on non-Jewish crowds. “I don’t think there are many German films on a Jewish subject that are lighthearted.”
“I loved that movie,” said Irene Runge, the founder of the Jewish Cultural Association in Berlin.
“It used to be that everything about Jews was always about the past,” said Runge, who invited Levy and his co-writer, Holger Franke, to talk at the association’s center earlier this year. With this film, “German Jews have fun; non-Jews have fun. And I think you go out of the film with a more positive feeling, not like what we had before. It’s how we see ourselves, and that’s what I like about it.”